This page was created by Diem Dao. The last update was by Jeanne Britton.
Ruins of a Sculpture Gallery in Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli
The key, in the foreground, points in a diagonal line across the surface of inner, undisturbed arched space, to elements that are, like the key, also in the foreground of the image. A reader of this annotated image remains on the surface of its picture plane, in the foreground where its key, annotation, and stooped staffage figures appear. The viewer, though, is led visually by successive arches and alternating light and shadow into the misnamed sculpture gallery, populated now with living human forms. If, according to Susan Stewart, Piranesi shows “a vertico-inducing facility for moving between the page and the architectural space” (165), then this image manipulates that skill by creating a textual layer coterminous with the surface of the printed page that overlays the architectural space it depicts. It is a word-image composite whose tensions between the two domains, visible only if the key is consulted and used, keep readers at a remove even as the composition pulls viewers inside. Additionally, to populate what is assumed to be a sculpture gallery with human figures engaged in varied postures, stances, and gestures is to suggest a comparison between living life forms and immobile statuary, a comparison that in this print is appropriately framed by “the picturesque contrast” of the cross-vault delicately overgrown with botanical life (Pinto and MacDonald 258). As such, while the image’s key records works of decorative art that, today, no longer exist, its visual comparison between art (statues, architecture) and life (human beings, plants) makes it “an essay on the transience of the works of mankind” (Campbell 585). It is also an examination of surface and depth, both in terms of architectural structure and ornament as well as visual composition and image annotation. (JB)
To see this image in the Vedute di Roma, volume 17 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.